Subgraphs vs Substreams: Choosing the Right Tool for Blockchain Data

The Graph's blockchain data solutions, Subgraphs and Substreams, cater to different project needs.

Subgraphs are ideal for frontend applications, analytics dashboards, and smaller projects requiring real-time state queries. They aggregate historical and current blockchain data into a persistent indexed state, simplifying complex relational queries.

Substreams, introduced more recently, enable high-performance parallelized data pipelines, reducing indexing times by up to 100x compared to Subgraphs.

Migrating from Subgraphs to Substreams can be seamless with tools like substreams-convert, which automates much of the translation process.